UC Berkeley

In Echo Otherwise, I bring together two writers, Lucretius and Ferdinand de Saussure, whose kinship might seem to resist notice at first. However, the affinities between this unlikely pair are to be discovered along the wandering paths this dissertation forges, and in the conversation animated by my readings of their attention to sound. Indeed, the pairing of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and Saussure’s unpublished anagram notebooks discloses a set of remarkably interconnected and overlapping concerns. Both writers are interested in how sound works and in what sounds and resounds in the universe of poems and atoms, and both are attentive to what sound tells us about poems and atoms. I take them as models for the kinds of attention they perform as readers, writers, and theorists who in turn demand the same of their readers. These demands, as I understand them, instruct us to be guided by our sense perceptions, even if this warrants a disobedience to the conventions of disciplines and the decorum of genre. In the Coda, the modes of instruction I find in Lucretius and Saussure inform my approach to reading M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and several works by Saidiya Hartman. I turn to Philip’s work because of the urgent questions it asks of us, among them: How are we formed in and by languages at once already determined by histories of subjugation and open to linguistic indeterminacy and surplus, the excess that eludes capture? Like Philip, Hartman writes within and against the archives of transatlantic slavery, and asks what forms and modes of writing this archive blocks and enables. In the Coda I thus disclose and perform a reading of (a listening to) the sounds that other writers have made resound from depths that ordinary, or ordinarily organized language, text, or speech could not otherwise body forth. The writing that my listening induces, then, carries forward what they may have heard in what wasn’t quite or couldn’t be said—an echo and a trace—as an offering towards an otherwise to the aftermath of ongoing catastrophes.